RETRO READS

HOW TO BE GOOD BY NICK HORNBY (Penguin £10)

What you don’t glimpse on your wedding day is that sometime in the future you may come to hate your spouse.

So ponders Katie, a London GP whose husband, David, is driving her up the wall. He is grumpy, always scowling, wears baggy Y-fronts and - after 22 years of marriage - she loathes him. When she announces that she wants a divorce he tells her not to spout rubbish.

Then David meets hippie healer GoodNews, has a personality change and starts giving away his children’s computers and £20 notes to the homeless.

Hornby’s pacey satire on modern marriage is still fresh, funny and pulsing with spiky wit.

OUR SPOONS CAME FROM WOOLWORTHS BY BARBARA COMYNS (Virago £8.99)

It is well worth reading Comyns’ weird little novel if only to gasp at the autobiographical details in Chapter 11 in which our cash-strapped artists’ model narrator, Sophia, gives birth in a grim public hospital.

The 1950s routine nursing horrors certainly make you appreciate modern NHS maternity care.

Sophia’s story - marriage to a struggling artist, poverty, her husband’s increasing indifference and selfishness, his suggestion that their child is sent to a home, a botched abortion, infidelity - is gruellingly gripping.

Those were the days when Sophia (20) thinks ‘birth control’ means controlling your thoughts about babies when having sex.

Based closely on Comyns’s own life, it’s classic, bohemian kitchen-sink drama, but with a happy ending.

Confession! It was the 1920 photo of the late Russian author Gazdanov (phwoar!) that attracted me to his psychological thriller. Gazdanov’s narrator lives with the terrible memory that, at the age of 16, he killed a Cossack soldIer in a woodland glade during the Revolution.

Years later he reads a short story in which the author, Wolf, describes in minute detail how he was killed by a 16-year-old-soldier in a woodland glade. How can this be? Our horrified narrator knows that the two were alone with no witnesses. He sets out to find Wolf, the man he surely murdered.

And so begins a labyrinthine quest that takes him to London, Paris, to the heights of steamy passion and to the realisation that ‘the chain of events in each human life is miraculous’. Co-incidence, fate, guilt, redemption, love, death and melodrama are thrillingly interwoven with irresistible style and elegance.